Smoke Screens

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday Christoper Booker says that two major studies on the effects of passive smoking found that there was no evidence to support claims that passive smoking was injurious to health. I can add to this, when the second and possibly more extensive of these studies from the American Cancer Society came out I was given the task of reading it and can concur that the findings of the study were that there was indeed no evidence to link passive smoking to smoking related diseases. This report however was still distributed in the UK by anti-smoking groups who added their own press releases which asserted that whilst there was no evidence, those who conducted the research remained of the opinion that it must be harmful. The British press the carried the headline “Passive smoking kills official!”

As a lifelong non-smoker I always avoid smoking areas as do most of my friends who are also non-smokers but none of us feels the ban on smoking in public places was justified on medical evidence. The problem when assessing the effects of passive smoking is that it is impossible to isolate the “victims” from other damaging influences. We all passively breath in the fumes of cars. “Victims” may take no exercise, eat lousy food, drink far too much or work in unhealthy conditions. To attribute 12,000 deaths a year to the effects of passive smoking is to insult the public’s intelligence. The ban was a political move to appease those people who think we should all be told what to do and those others who want to do the telling.

In most pubs I frequent there was a smoking area and a non-smoking area and smoking was banned in the toilets and near the bar. In others there was already a total smoking ban insituted by the landlords. It is ludicrous that the Government does not feel the British public is capable of choosing for themselves which environment they wish to place themselves in. And all the while they keep peddling statistics and information which is at total odds with genuine research in order ro justify their intrusive legislation.